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UXPA International Short Courses

Educational, timely, and relevant short courses to foster continued education among new and experienced UX practitioners. Courses will be presented live via GoToWebinar, and recordings will be available to students immediately following each class. Courses will be instructor-led with interactive participation. The UXPA international courses are not part of any accreditation system. A participation certificate will be available upon request.

Usability testing is rarely one size fits all. Each project has unique needs and those needs must be considered carefully to get actionable insights. With emerging technologies, there is no longer a need to only conduct "traditional" user testing. With a little creativity, and the right tools in your belt, the options are endless. In this course, we will take you through end-to-end examples of how to get the insights you need using creative approaches to usability testing. You will learn how to evaluate your research goals and write a test plan, in addition to some tips on moderating and data analysis.

Course Objectives

This course offers practical information on conducting usability testing in various forms, both traditional and non-traditional. If you’re looking to hone your research skills and gain inspiration for new approaches to usability testing, this course is for you.

Course Methodology

Three 90-minute online lectures on Jan 11, 18, 25 at 9 AM PST.

2 homework assignments

Course will be conducted in English

Course Contents

Lecture 1:

About us and our approach

New world of usability testing

Types of research questions and resulting methodologies

Homework: What are your research questions?

Lecture 2:

Overview of creative usability testing

Tackling your research questions

Homework: Build your own hack

Lecture 3:

Build your own hack activity

Moderating tips and tricks

Reporting/Analysis

Instructors

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Sarah Garcia, Research Lead, UEGroup

Sarah has been a usability researcher since 2004, when she traded her marketing research hat for UX consultancy at UEGroup in San Jose. Since then, she’s had the opportunity to work with nearly 100 companies, help build two usability labs, conduct thousands of research sessions and ethnographic interviews–from operating rooms to living rooms. Sarah brings business and marketing savvy to the research she takes on and has developed curriculum for practical UX methodologies which she has presented at various conferences and on a UX podcast. Sarah is known for always asking the question “how can we make this better?” and most recently has been working on building tools for researchers, including discovering ways to capture user emotions and make recruiting for studies less laborious. When not changing the world through UX, she’s cooking with her daughter, watching her son play soccer or helping her husband build a local arts magazine for Silicon Valley.

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Megan McCracken, UX Researcher, UEGroup

Megan is a multifaceted UX researcher with a background in Cognitive Science. This discipline allowed her to incorporate her fascination with psychology with her love of science. She brings a deep understanding of behavioral psychology to her work, which allows her to empathize with both users and developers. She began working as a researcher in her professor’s psycholinguistics lab, then transferred into the UX industry. This experience has widened her research repertoire to include not only in-lab and remote usability testing, but also ethnographies, diary studies, interceptive interviews, generative research, emotions tracking, OOBE testing, and prototype testing.